—16-Hour 02: Charleston—
THEY SPENT THE day in dread of the approaching evening. The train reached Charleston late, pulling into the station at almost two past sixteen. They unloaded their trunks and had time to eat a quick dinner of bread and cheese and cold meat in the busy station before the train to New Akan starting boarding. Sophia had written a letter to Mrs. Clay on the train, and she posted it hurriedly. The last rays of sunlight streamed in through the high windows. Pigeons filled the vaulted ceiling of the station, and the sound of train whistles cut shrilly through their low, incessant cooing.
Sophia had seen no sign of Montaigne or the Sandmen. There were businessmen traveling alone and families traveling in large groups. A small party of nuns waited patiently in the station atrium. The train to New Akan was fully booked, and as they waited on the platform they saw why: a long chain of police officers stood beside a waiting crowd of foreigners, all of whom were departing by train.
Sophia was struck by the defeated look of these unwilling travelers. Some seemed indignant or outraged. But most seemed simply bereft, as did one couple with resigned faces whose child cried quietly and ceaselessly, gripping the skirt of an old woman beside him. In between cries, he pleaded, “Don’t go, Grandmother.” She placed a trembling hand on the little boy’s head and wiped at her own tears. For that moment, as she watched them, Sophia could not think about the approaching darkness and the threat that might come with it.
“All aboard!” the conductor called, and the passengers began to file onto the train. Sophia followed Theo to the last car, dragging her trunk behind her.
Once they had found their compartment and her luggage was stowed, Sophia watched the station platform. The Gulf Regional was an older train, with a rather bumpy leather seat and dim lamps. It took several minutes for everyone to board, and then at seventeen-hour the conductor blew the whistle. The train glided out of the station into the falling darkness.
Sophia sighed with relief. “Good thing it’s summer and the sun sets so late,” she said, eyeing the pale moon.
They settled in and Sophia opened her pack to distract herself. She held the glass map up to the window, but nothing happened; there was still not enough moonlight. As she returned the map to her notebook, she saw the two scraps of paper from Shadrack’s letter. There was little satisfaction in having tricked Montaigne, she thought despondently, when Montaigne had managed to trick her as well. They had clearly made Shadrack write the note for the very purpose of deceiving her.
But as Sophia stared at the note, she realized that there was something a little strange about Shadrack’s handwriting. His hand was clear and assured, as always, but it was broken in places by strange capitalizations:
dear sophia,
T H Ey have said alL i cAn plaCe on tHis papeR Is your naMe
—shAdrack
She wrote the capitalized letters one by one in her notebook, and as she finished she gasped. “Theo, look!”
After a moment, his face lit up. “The Lachrima,” he said softly. “Let me see that.” He read it over. “Why would he write that?”
“I don’t know.”
“He could just be warning you about them,” Theo said.
Sophia frowned. “Maybe. It seems strange, though. Why warn me about something that everyone’s already afraid of?”
“But he doesn’t know you know about them.”
“That’s true, though I heard Mrs. Clay telling him about what happened to her. It still seems strange.” She took back the note. “Theo, tell me what else you know about them.”
“I can tell you what I’ve heard,” he said, his voice warming. The Lachrima were clearly a favorite subject. “Like I said before, I’ve never seen one, but there’s a lot of them near the borders. They usually hide—they try to stay away from people.”
“Why do you think there are so many near the borders?” Sophia mused.
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe there’s something about the borders—something that draws them there.”
“Maybe.” But he was clearly unconvinced.
“Have you ever heard one?”
“It’s hard to know. Sometimes when you hear someone crying, people say it’s a Lachrima, but that’s just because they’re afraid it might be one. I’ve heard crying, but supposedly the sound a Lachrima makes is different—much worse. It’s a sound you can’t get out of your mind.”
“Poor Mrs. Clay,” Sophia murmured.
“A trader I met once said he’d come across one in his house,” Theo went on enthusiastically. “He’d been gone for a week and when he got back, he could hear the Lachrima before he’d even reached the door. He walked in really quietly and just saw this tall person with long, long hair going through the whole house like a whirlwind, pulling things from the walls and wrecking everything. Then it suddenly turned around and looked at him with that faceless face. The trader said he ran right out and never went back.”
“Shadrack must know something about them.” The Lachrima, the glass map, Montaigne, and the Nihilismians, she thought; what do they have to do with one another? “Montaigne called the glass map a ‘tracing glass.’ I wonder what that means.”
“Maybe it’s just another way to describe a glass map?”
“Maybe,” Sophia considered. She tried another tack. “Do you know anything about the people he called ‘Sandmen’?”
Theo shook his head. “I’ve never even heard that name.”
“They were all Nihilismians.”
“How could you tell?”
“Their amulets,” Sophia said, surprised. “The open hand.”
Theo shrugged. “I know about Nihilismians, but I’ve never met one. There aren’t many in the Baldlands.”
“They’re everywhere in New Occident. They think our world isn’t real. They use The Chronicles of the Great Disruption to prove that the real world was lost at the time of the Disruption and this one—our world—shouldn’t exist. The open hand is the sign of the prophet Amitto, who wrote the Chronicles. It means ‘to let go.’”
“So you’ve never heard them called ‘Sandmen’?”
“Never. They must be somehow different. But I can’t tell how . . .” Her voice dropped off as her mind worked to connect the pieces. What had Shadrack said to her recently about Nihilismians? She could not remember. He had told her something, and it had to do with maps. Maybe I wrote it in my notebook, she thought. But it held no clues.
As the train rolled west, the sky darkened and a yellow moon emerged, hanging low behind the trees. Theo climbed up to his bunk to sleep, and Sophia sat watching the passing landscape, feeling anything but sleepy. Hills with crests topped by pines gave way to flatlands dotted with farmhouses. Every time the train pulled into one of the small, rural stations on the westward line, she felt certain that Montaigne and his men would board, but the people who stood under the flame-lamps were invariably sleepy, harried travelers on their way westward. So far, Sophia and Theo were in the clear.
—June 24: 1-Hour 18—
IT WAS PAST one in the morning when the train crossed the border between South Carolina and Georgia. Sophia took out her notebook. Men with scars, a cowering faceless creature with long hair, and a small sparrow came to life on the paper. Clockwork Cora sat hunched in the corner, brow furrowed, contemplating the problem. Sophia looked at the page for a long time. There was a riddle there; a riddle she had to solve. She drew a line, making a border around the Lachrima. Her mind whirled wearily over the sketched images like the wheels of the railcar.